After each Ashes test match last summer, we went into the Australian dressing room or they came into ours for a beer. But when you're batting against Brett Lee bowling 97mph it's not friendly.

I was quite fortunate not to get Delhi belly on the recent tour of India, but a lot of the lads got ill. Singing 'Ring of Fire' came about because there is always an iPod in the changing room.

It was the final day of the third test and the lads wanted a sing-song. Though there were certainly a few rings of fire knocking about.

When I was 17, I got hit in the knackers batting and I put them in ice water that David Lloyd [former Lancashire and England coach] gave me. Gary Yates, the Lancashire spinner, had been out training. I put the glass on the side and he ended up drinking the water.

There's a lot of practical joking that goes on in the England dressing room. It's an amazing place. You can sit for hours, and there is a mixture of people - like Matthew Hoggard, who gets bored very, very easy. I just mill around. If I'm batting at six, I'll have my shorts and T-shirt on until three wickets down, then it's a mad rush to get all my kit on. That's what a cricketer has bad dreams about - getting timed out.

It's quite bizarre, especially over the past 12 or 18 months, how the profiles of the cricket lads have been raised. I'm just going with it at the minute. The cricket's great; everything else - the media, the photographs - I'm not as comfortable with.

I played chess as a kid. I was a bit of a maverick. There are tactics involved in chess and cricket. But bowling 90mph is a bit different from moving a pawn two places.

Bowling is about the wrist. You've got to keep it locked in the right position.

My embrace of Brett Lee [at the end of the second Ashes test at Edgbaston] was instinctive. We had hit him, tried to knock him out, and he kept coming back at us. But there was too much made of that embrace, that it was 'spirit of the Ashes'. The lad had done well.

The biggest memory I have of the Ashes summer was when the umpires called off play at the Oval and we found out we'd won them. And seeing what it meant to the 30,000 people who stayed behind to see us collect them. Those celebrations at the Oval and the open-top bus ride to Trafalgar Square with all those people turning out is something I never thought I'd experience through playing cricket.

I spoke with my wife Rachel about not returning homefrom India for the birth of my second child. I had the opportunity to captain my country, which I'd always wanted to do. Rachel said, 'When he's older and asks, "Where were you at my birth?" you can say, "Well, I was actually captaining England!"' Hopefully he'll be all right with that.

Being at home with the family makes me happy. There's times on tour when you get back to your hotel room that can be difficult, but that's probably one of the very few negatives.